Pharmacies are an important source of medications and health-related products for a wide range of people including, for example, retail customers, hospitalized patients and residents of alternate site (e.g., long term care) facilities. The pharmacy which serves the needs of such people may be located for instance, in a retail environment, such as a drugstore, or a facility adjunct to the hospital or alternate site facility. A typical pharmacy is staffed by at least one registered pharmacist and is further staffed by trained pharmacy technicians and clerks.
Pharmacy personnel provide a broad range of services and information. For example, the pharmacist typically has overall responsibility for ensuring that all prescription orders for medications and health-related products are fulfilled properly. The pharmacy technicians may assist the pharmacist in fulfillment of the prescription orders and in replenishment of the medication inventory. Pharmacists and pharmacy technicians commonly provide other important service such as interaction with customers, doctors and care givers, the provision of health-related advice, data entry and processing of medical and financial information adjunct to fulfillment of the prescription orders. Provision of advice and information may include direct interaction with others while data processing and order fulfillment typically involve interaction between the pharmacy personnel and a computer or with the medications and products needed to fulfill the prescription orders. For example, fulfillment of the prescription orders may involve locating one or more medications or products at a static storage shelf or other storage location, dispensing a quantity of the medications or products required to fill each prescription comprising the order, manually packaging the medications in containers (such as bottles and vials) and dispensing the packaged medications and products to the customer, doctor or care giver.
It is highly desirable for the pharmacist and pharmacy technician personnel to be available to provide high value added services, such as providing health-related advice and information to customers, doctors and care givers. It is also desirable to fulfill each prescription order in terms of the lowest possible cost function. Such cost function may be defined in terms of many variables, such as the total time required to fulfill each prescription order, the spacial distance traveled by the pharmacy personnel within the pharmacy in order to fulfill each prescription order and the cost to the pharmacy of the medication and products used to fulfill each prescription order. The cost function may also be defined in terms of cost reduction through coordination of the fulfillment of co-pending prescription orders. A further critical requirement of the pharmacy is the need for accuracy and error avoidance in the fulfillment of the prescription orders.
To these and other ends, there has been a growing use and acceptance of automation in connection with fulfillment of prescription orders by pharmacies. Such automation can include the use of computerized information databases for processing medical and financial information, the use of automated apparatus for dispensing medications and articles and the use of machine-readable code (e.g., bar coding) for purposes of ensuring accuracy in fulfillment of the prescription orders and in maintaining inventory. Any improvement in pharmacy efficiency may result in an overall better level of service to the customer, doctor or care giver.
A major problem confronting the use of automation in the pharmacy environment is the legitimate need for human beings to participate in the prescription order fulfillment process. Pharmacy personnel are required to make many complex decisions and to undertake many tasks to fulfill the prescription orders in an efficient manner. Judgments must be made, for example, as to the medications and products best suited to the customer's needs and the most efficient path by which to locate, obtain, package and dispense the contents of each prescription order, and to do this in a manner which minimizes the potential for error. Moreover, human beings require time to fulfill the prescription orders including the time required to move spatially within the pharmacy from storage location to storage location. In fact, it has been demonstrated that a pharmacy employee may walk as much as five miles throughout the pharmacy during the course of a typical work week; this represents a time component which contributes to the cost function associated with fulfillment of the prescription orders. Consequently, the use of pharmacy automation must coordinate human and machine resources to fulfill each prescription order at the lowest cost function with the highest possible level of error avoidance.
While there are a number of pharmacy automation systems and products described in the art, those systems and products do not disclose systems for optimized management of workflow associated with fulfillment of the prescription orders. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,597,995 (Williams et al.) describes a prescription fulfillment system which requires imaging, filling and checking work stations. Medication is dispensed into containers at the filling work station from a collection of automated dispenser apparatus or from static storage locations. While certain efficiencies are derived from use of automated dispenser apparatus, the '995 patent fails to describe any coordinated and optimized use of the system components to select medications with the lowest cost function and fail to disclose any procedure or apparatus to efficiently sequence the prescriptions comprising fulfillment of the prescription orders thereby optimally reducing the cost function associated with the fulfillment process.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,907,493 (Boyer et al.) describes a pharmaceutical dispensing system for filling prescriptions in a pharmacy setting. A central computer controls a plurality of pill dispensing cells each of which are stated to include helical singulation apparatus each under the control of a separate microprocessor. Medications may also be stored for dispensing at shelf locations. While the central computer is stated to store information regarding a plurality of drugs in predetermined, separately-addressable cells and to arrange that information to provide optimum efficiency of pharmaceutical operations, such assertion of efficiency does not include any coordinated and optimized use of the system components to select optimized medications for each prescription and then sequence filling of the prescription so as to optimally reduce the cost function associated with the prescription order fulfillment process.
An automated pharmacy is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,202,923 (Boyer et al.). The pharmacy described therein is said to have improved pharmacy throughput because the labels to be affixed to the medication containers are generated once the specified prescription is displayed at a filling workstation thereby avoiding any requirement to manually transfer labels from an upstream data entry workstation. Unfortunately, workflow in the automated pharmacy is not fully optimized because, once again, there is no provision for any optimized sequencing of the prescriptions comprising the prescription order to reduce the cost function associated with the prescription order fulfillment process.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,181,979 (Murakami) discusses a drug preparation system. Data are collected to determine the throughput times of particular drug processing and throughput stations within the system. The information is used to allocate pharmacy personnel to the various drug processing and inspection stations but is not utilized to determine an optimum sequence of prescriptions within an order.
It would be significant improvement in the art to provide an improved pharmacy automation system and method of pharmacy workflow management which would optimally reduce the cost function associated with fulfillment of prescription orders, which would reduce the potential for errors in the fulfillment process, which would be operable to control virtually any type of dispensing and storage apparatus, which would be adaptable for use in many different pharmacy environments, including for example, retail pharmacies, alternate site facilities, hospitals and like facilities, and which would free pharmacists and pharmacy technicians to perform high value added services thereby better serving the customers, doctors and care givers reliant on the pharmacy.